Fully fit Flannery focused on winning World Cup send-off
The calf problem that threatened Flannery’s career has ceased to be a concern, leaving the 32-year-old to concentrate on helping deliver a first victory of the summer warm-up series of Tests on Saturday at the Aviva Stadium.
Flannery has been involved in all of the three August defeats as he carefully plots a route back to full match fitness, playing 19 minutes against Scotland and then 20 apiece in the away and home meetings with France.
“I’m pretty happy now, I’m not worried about injury any more, I just want to get on the field of play as hard as I can,” Flannery said following Saturday’s game at the Aviva Stadium.
“I feel like I’ve a lot of rugby in me. Mentally I’m fresh. I just want to play as much as I can. I’m very hungry.
“I’m not worried about getting injured, if I break down I break down.
“What’s there to be afraid of? Just get out and play, what’s the alternative?
“I’ve been injured for a year, I just want to play.”
Flannery admitted there had been “a good few times I thought I was going to have to pack it in. Even up to maybe six weeks ago I wasn’t completely sure,” but on the eve of the opening warm-up Test against Scotland three weeks ago he made an active decision to stop worrying about the injury.
“It got to the stage where I was trying to play around in my head where I didn’t feel great a lot of the time and eventually I said, ‘well look, the World Cup is coming up here and we have these games, so I’m either going to make up my mind and go for this and if I break down, I break down’.
“So I just went for it and week by week it’s been good.
“It’s kind of a case now where you don’t worry about it, I’m not 24, I’m not worried about retiring, I just want to go out and play as hard as I can all the time.
“I’m looking back on the last year and thinking I haven’t taken the same beating that the rest of the lads have physically, I just want to go out and play as much as possible.”
The next chance will come next week against the English and Flannery is revved up to end the current losing streak.
“The reality is that we’ve lost three games on the bounce and we’re going to the World Cup, and for those of us that were there before, we don’t want anything like that lingering, we want to try to go New Zealand – those of us who are hopefully selected – and we’re going to do a job.
“That’s not easy to do after four games that you’ve lost, so obviously it’s more pressure after this loss.
“I just know there’s a lot more to come from this Irish team. We’ve just got to work a lot harder and apply our gameplan. But I’m aware that you can’t keep putting it off until next week. We’ve got to do it now.”
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